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Thursday, January 18, 2007

Vista Slow?

I recently read a PC World Article (Feb 2007 issue) titled "Vista: Not Slow" that goes on to add, "Overall, our test apps did seem to run slower with Window's Vista". Uh, but wait...you said "Not Slow" in a review that in fact reveals that XP is actually faster than Vista? I'm confused... All-in-all, the review reveals a mixed bag of results that left me scratching my head. Long story short, if you run Vista on older crap hardware it is much slower than XP, which accounts for Vista's monster hardware requirements. It apparently does better when loaded up with the best dual-core CPU, and high-end graphics card (which OS doesn't?). The 64-bit version is slower than the 32-bit unless you feed it lot's of extra memory. The tests involved running single or multiple applications (Adobe, Far Cry, etc.). Mainly, I'm pissed that PC World didn't call it like it saw it. If the damn thing is overall slower, say so, and maybe get some feedback from MS (which probably would have been minimal, admittedly). Better yet, compare Vista to similar applications running on x86 Linux, eh? I'm not sure how useful a performance test of Vista vs. XP really is, in the final analysis.

My current x86 machine will barely run Vista, and by the time it hits the scrap heap next year or thereafter, I will probably have to run Windows Vista on something new anyway, and it will still be a pig, eating gobs of memory like a rottweiller in a meat-packing plant ("super-fetch"...puh-lease). Last year, I won an old refurbed Sun Ultra 10 in an on-line contest (shout out to bytekcorp.com) with 256MB of RAM (think 10-15 year old technology). I downloaded Solaris 10 free from Sun, installed it on the old warhorse and was chatting, browsing, and doing e-mail with it in like 10 minutes. It's a tad noisy, ugly, and for some graphics tasks admittedly slow, but it runs Star Office twice as fast as Office on my PC, and straight-up browsing or e-mail, fahgedddabouttit (and I'm talking x86 in the last 5 years). Oh yeah, it's also stable. Maybe PC World should stop being a shill for MS, and maybe MS should go shove Vista where...well you get the idea.